Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis

by Franz Gabriel Alexander

This authoritative book gives a comprehensive view of the present state of psychoanalytic knowledge. It explains in a concise and straightforward way, avoiding the obscurity of technical books and the dangerous glibness of popularization, the basic concepts of psychoanalysis and their application for the understanding and treatment of mental disturbances.

324 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1963

Reviews

[Tania Bradkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

PHENOMENAL MODALITY LOVE LOVE LOVE will write more later

[Michael Kulyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in the early eighties in whilst training as a psychotherapist. I'd read Calvin Hall's excellent 'A Primer of Freudian Psychology' and needed something to read more in the area of psychopathology and this fitted the bill. It provides a relatively short overview of psychoanalytic theory with a focus on a spectrum of psychopathologies. Very clearly written and comprehensive, no doubt this book would have been a go to book for students of psychiatry when it was first published in the late forties.
Franz Alexander keeps mainly to a strictly Freudian ego psychology framework, his only difference with Freud is a rejection of the death instinct and explains the compulsion to repeat in terms of the constancy principle much as Otto Fenichel does in his encyclopaedic 'Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis'.The book is very clearly written and quite suitable for those beginning their training in the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy.